Peter W. Kaplan, 1954-2013

Former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan died on
Friday. “The meat of his tenure occurred during the unfettered,
exuberant, often crass nineties boom, and the Observer
glorified the city’s inhabitants and their rituals even as it
skewered them, turning them into Drew Friedman gargoyles, putting
words in their mouths with his characteristic barking, yawping
headlines that were more like sentences or whole paragraphs
(‘headlines that talked!’ as he said), finishing the story before
the prose had even begun,”
observes John Homans. This
piece from last year is also worth reading.
Kaplan was 59.#